Neanderthals may have been redheads

Light skin may have been an evolutionary advantage for Neanderthals as this could have allowed them to generate more vitamin D from sunlight (Image: Michael Hofreiter and Kurt Fiusterweier/MPG EVA)

Some Neanderthals may have had fair skin and red hair, making them look like modern Europeans, international researchers say.

The study, published today in the journal Science, comes a week after another set of researchers said Neanderthals may have been capable of sophisticated speech.

"The papers make Neanderthals more like modern Europeans, with light skin and hair colour and language abilities, and yet there are no signs of interbreeding with modern humans," says Professor Carles Lalueza-Fox, a molecular biologist at the University of Barcelona in a commentary in Science.

Taken together, the two studies are the first to extract nuclear DNA from Neanderthal remains and represent a new way to learn more about the extinct early humans, the researchers says.

Nuclear DNA is the DNA in the nucleus of the cell that makes up nearly all the genetic information people carry.

Neanderthals were a dead-end offshoot of the human line that inhabited Europe and parts of west and central Asia.

Research indicates they were expert toolmakers, used animal skins to keep warm and cared for each other.

Most researchers believe Neanderthals survived in Europe until the arrival of fully modern humans about 30,000 years ago.

But debated findings last year suggests they might have survived until as recently as 24,000 years ago.

Making a gene

The researchers homed in on the MC1R gene linked to hair and skin colour.

They then produced a DNA sequence from the fragmented Neanderthal MC1R gene to make a modified copy they could study in a test tube.

This allowed the team to determine that the gene produced the same level of the chemical melanin as in people with red hair and light skin.

The variation itself was different to that in modern humans but the result was the same.

Light skin would have been an evolutionary advantage for Neanderthals by allowing them to generate more vitamin D from sunlight in cloudy Europe, the researchers say.

The findings also provide important clues about Neanderthal and human evolution, and represent the first of many such experiments likely to use the same DNA technique to learn far more than could be gleaned from fossils alone, researchers say.